


Shēngcún

by always_a_queen



Category: Arrow (TV 2012)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Gender Changes, F/M, Genderswap
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-08-28
Updated: 2014-05-23
Packaged: 2017-12-24 18:46:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 5,857
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/943383
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/always_a_queen/pseuds/always_a_queen
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Heiress party-girl Olivia Queen returns to Starling City with a quiver full of arrows and a vow to her father to take down the people poisoning her city. Technological genius Finley Smoak was just supposed to be another tool to help her do that.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Return

**Author's Note:**

> I don't know what this fic is doing. I don't know when or how often I'll be updating it. I don't know anything except it demanded to be written, so here it is.
> 
> I'm told shēngcún means survive in Mandarin. If that is wrong please please please someone correct me.

 

 

 

 

_"Breaking news: Olivia Queen is alive. The Starling City resident was found by fisherman in the North China Sea five days ago -- five years after she was missing and presumed dead following the accident at sea that claimed the Queen's Gambit."_

 

 

* * *

 

 

Starling City is cold, but not cold in the same way _Lian Yu_ was cold. The coldness of _Lian Yu_ was a bitter ache that sunk into Olivia's bones and refused to leave. Starling City is distant, unfamiliar. The city is foreign to her now, no longer her home, her ally, her friend. The contrast is surreal in a way, disorienting.

She's dreamed of returning for so long that this reality still feels like a fantasy. Olivia's not sure what's real anymore; she's not even sure _she's_ real anymore. The real Olivia Queen drowned in the ocean on a yacht. This Olivia was born on _Lian Yu_ , in the rain and the dirt and the brutal waves.

Rain pelts against the window in front of her and slides down the windowpane, blurring the glittering city below her. Her reflection is there, beyond the droplets of water, fuzzy and distorted.

She reaches her hand up to touch the glass, tracing the lines of her jaw.

A small mirror weighs heavily in her other hand. The nurse hesitated to give it to her, but Olivia was quietly insistent.

She doesn't use it to look at her face; she doesn't want to see that. She wants to see the scars on her back. She wants to see how the raised tissue crisscrosses over her shoulder blade. It's idle curiosity, nothing more. They don't matter.

Twenty percent of her body is covered in scar tissue. That's what she overheard one of the nurses say, and that was the number she used. Twenty percent. One fifth.

It's a ridiculous number. The nurse doesn't have the ability to catalogue all of the damage. The only scars she can count are the ones she can see: the second degree burns on her back and arms, the fractures the X-rays reveal.

No one knows how everything aches in her bones, weighs on her shoulders. They can't see the constant agony thrumming through her veins. It's a chronic pain that Olivia's just learned to live with, to push down, to reign in.

"Olive?"

Olivia turns at the sound of her mother's voice and stares at the woman who's just entered the room. Her hair is different - curled, not quite as blonde as Olivia remembers it - and the lines around her mouth and eyes have deepened just a touch with age, but the woman is still her mother.

"Mom." The word is out of Olivia's mouth before she can stop it, and she's taken a step towards this woman who is so strange and so familiar at the same time.

Moira's eyes are filled with tears as she walks towards Olivia. "Olive."

Olivia has to fight against the instinct to shy away, to flinch back. Moira will not hurt her.

Gently, her mother's arms encircle her, and Olivia comes home.

 

* * *

 

 

The house looks bigger than she remembered it. The ceiling is cavernous above her. It's full of sunlight and memories.

Her mother is saying something, but Olivia's not there anymore. She's five years into the past, promising a squirming thirteen-year-old Thea that they will go see _Mamma Mia_ together when she gets back. She's hugging Raiza goodbye.

She's grabbing a bottle of red wine from Tommy and blowing him a kiss as she runs up the stairs. She's kissing Sean under the mistletoe hung above the front doorway; she's smelling the scent of her father's cigars wafting from his office.

Except Sean is gone; her father is gone; and Olivia still doesn't understand why she's still breathing.

The past is suffocating, chocking, and Olivia finds she can't stay there anymore. The present reasserts itself when a door upstairs slams and footfalls echo down the stairs.

Olivia looks up just as Thea reaches the landing. Her baby sister - the girl who was just starting to like boys, who sat up with her late into the night watching romantic comedies with a tub of Ben & Jerry's - is tall and willowy and beautiful. Her hair is long and curled, and she knows how to put on makeup. She probably has her own make-up now; she doesn't have to sneak into Olivia's room and 'borrow' hers, painting her lips with dark reds and sloppily smearing shadow around her eyes with no regard for anything resembling technique.

"Thea." For so long her sister's name, her sister's identity, her sister's very existence, has been such a closely guarded secret that the word feels foreign on Olivia's tongue.

Thea bounds down the stairs and jumps into her arms. Olivia is still taller, so Thea has to stop on the bottom step and push herself up on her tiptoes, the way she did five years ago.

"I missed you," Thea says, "I missed you so, so much."

Then they're both crying, and suddenly Olivia's remembering how it feels to cry because of _happiness_ , not pain or hurt or just wishing that her existence would _end already_. She presses her hand to the back of Thea's head, feeling the soft texture of her sister's curls, inhaling a sweet scent of a familiar shampoo. Olivia shuts her eyes tightly.

"You were with me the whole time."

 

* * *

 

 

"What did I tell you, 'Liv? Yachts suck." There's an undercurrent of emotion beneath Tommy Merlyn's joking tone. Olivia turns at the sound of his voice to see him standing in the doorway. A smile lights up his face when their eyes meet. His hug is firm and welcome; he hasn't changed at all.

"Tommy." Olivia blinks back tears as she hides her face in her best friend's shoulder.

Tommy Merlyn is everything from her life before. He's the guy who held her hair when she puked the first time she drank too much of her father's vodka. He's the guy who took a punch for her after he stepped between her and some creepy guy who was hitting on her. He's the one she called after a bad breakup, the one she saw bad movies with, the one who first taught her how to throw a punch, the one who got her into trouble and then got her out of it again.

She would call him a surrogate brother except they've screwed around a few too many times for that to really be accurate. Still. Losing her V-card to him and his talented tongue was more than worth it.

"I missed you, Livy," he whispers, kissing her cheek.

For the first time since the island, Olivia smiles because she's happy - not because it's expected. "I missed you too."

 

* * *

 

 

After the revelation that Olivia now has a stepfather she barely knows, Tommy takes her out for drinks.

He doesn't press her for information, and she doesn't offer him any. The island is a secret she wants to keep bottled away from the world. If she doesn't have to talk about it, then maybe it will stop hurting.

The whiskey burns at the back of her throat, but she downs one and then another. Tommy matches her shot for shot.

By the time Olivia's on her second shot, the words still won't come and the pain still won't go. She latches onto the only point of conversation she can find. "Who'd you hook up with at my funeral?

Uncomfortable is an awkward look on Tommy. "I hooked up with Laurel."

Olivia chokes on her third shot, wiping at her chin with the back of her hand. "You what?"

He shrugs at her. "After your funeral. I hooked up with Laurel."

She blinks at him, not sure of why that confession worsens the ache in her gut. She's not here to indulge in personal drama. She's here to make all the wrong things right again. "Was it good?"

Tommy smiles crookedly at her. "Yeah."

Tommy's been in love with Laurel Lance as long as Olivia can remember. Laurel is completely oblivious to this attraction, at least she was the last time Olivia saw her.

"How is Laurel?"

His grin fades. "Her brother is dead."

Olivia sobers immediately. "I know that. I saw him die."

"She blames you."

"It was my fault."

"No, Liv, it wasn't."

"He wouldn't have been on that boat if it wasn't for me."

Reaching across the table, Tommy grabs her hand. "Livie, Sean was on that boat because he loved you."

"Yes," she says, lifting another shot to her mouth, "and it killed him."

 

* * *

 

 

That night, Olivia dreams of the yacht going down, of saltwater fills her lungs, of Sean's screams as the crash of waves sweeps him away from her.

She dreams of her father's arms lifting her from the frigid water and dragging her onto the raft. To keep her warm he wraps his own coat around her lingerie clad body as the rain and wind whip around them. She screams Sean's name into the blackness until her throat is hoarse, but they never find him; he's just gone.

She dreams of her father's blood spilling on the life raft and his voice echoing around her. The sharp, tangy cold stabs her toes. Thunder booms and lightning flashes above her head. The storm that destroyed Olivia Queen. 

_You have to survive, Olivia._

She wakes with sweat dripping from her brow and her fingers locked around her mother's throat.

Olivia sleeps with her bedroom door locked after that.

 

* * *

 

 

"What do I call you?" Olivia asks.

"Diggle's good. Dig, if you want."

"You're ex-military?" Olivia doesn't wait for an answer; she silently unbuckles her seatbelt and slips out of the car, undeterred by the fact that it's still moving.

Away from Diggle, Olivia heads to the glades. She takes her wooden trunk and makes her way to her father's old factory in the glades. She sets in the center of the cavernous room and slowly spins around, taking in the view of the dilapidated building.

It'll need fixing. Olivia has never been under the impression that it wouldn't. She's also spent the past five years growing accustomed to hard labor.

Crafting the foundry into a functioning hideout takes the better part of three days and nights, during which time Olivia drags down huge standing lamps, boxes and boxes of computer equipment, and the wooden trunk she brought back from the island.

She sweats and she breaks and she builds, but in the end it's _done_.

Leaning back in her chair, Olivia smiles at her freshly set up system. Then she takes the last thing her father ever gave her, a bound notebook, and carefully flips through the pages until her eyes settle on a name.

Olivia pries open the lid of the trunk and throws it open. Her hands gently lift out the bow, fingers testing the tension of the string.

The compound bow was, in many ways, her only friend on the island. This was the one thing that never deserted or failed her.

Olivia takes a package of tennis balls, and walks over to the pitching machine she's set up.

Dumping the balls into the machine, Olivia grabs her quiver and presses the on-switch.

Not one of the tennis balls has a chance to hit the floor.

 

* * *

 

 

It takes a lot of convincing to get Tommy to take her to see Laurel, but in the end, Olivia gets what she wants. Really, when it comes to Tommy, Olivia knows how to always get what she wants.

The second she sees Olivia, Laurel's face goes dark.

"He was my brother, Livy, not one of your playthings. You didn't get to use him and throw him out like all your other one night stands."

"That wasn't what it was like."

"What _was_ it like, Olive? Because Sean loved you for _years_ and up until the moment you talked him onto that yacht you never cared to give him the time of day."

"He meant a lot to me."

"You know what's the worst? I couldn’t be angry at you because you were dead, and I couldn’t grieve because I was so angry at the both of you. That’s what happens when your brother dies while screwing your best friend."

"Laurel," Tommy says, "That's not fair."

She whirls on him. "You don't get a say on what's fair. How did you think this was going to go, Meryln?"

The expression on Tommy's face would be adorable if it wasn't so pained. "About like this."

Laurel spins back to Olivia. "We buried an empty coffin. Because my brother's body is at the bottom of the ocean. Where you left him."

With that, Laurel walks back into CNRI.

Casually, Tommy slides up next to Olivia and nudges her shoulder with his. "You alright?"

Olivia doesn't look at him. "Yeah," she lies. "I'm fine.

 

* * *

 

 

Olivia's hands are steady as she paints the mask around her eyes, deep greens and dark blacks she's chosen to help conceal her identity. She loads her arrows into her quiver with careful precision.

When she finds Adam Hunt, he is surrounded by people on the bottom floor of his office's parking garage, but bodyguards and lawyers can't protect him from _her_.

Fitting an arrow to her bowstring, Olivia readies her breath. After the first arrow strikes, one of Hunt's bodyguards fires a shot off at her.

"Hey," she says, teasingly, surprising a giggle. "You missed." Her distorted voice echoes around the parking structure. The effect is eerie, and it forces Olivia to surprises a smile. It barely takes her twenty seconds to efficiently remove the rest of the bodyguards from the equation.

When a terrified Adam Hunt lands hard on the glass covered concrete, he looks up to see her crouched on the roof of his car, arrow trained right on him. He holds out his hands in a gesture of surrender.

"Just tell me what you want!" he screams.

Leaping down, Olivia grabs Hunt by his lapels, leers down and softly says, "You're going to transfer 40,000 million dollars into Starling City Bank account 1141 by 10 pm tomorrow night."

"Or what?"

"Or I'm going to take it. And you won't like how." He flinches away from her; but Olivia calmly starts walking away.

"If I see you again you're dead!" Hunt yells after her.

Olivia happily sends him one last arrow to remember her by.

 

* * *

 

 

Tommy insists on throwing Olivia's Welcome Back From The Dead Bash in typical over-the-top Tommy Merlyn fashion. Nevertheless, Olivia forbids him from inviting the male strippers, although she can't help but notice that all the male servers are topless. And built.

And if Olivia was even remotely interested in a one night stand, she might be a little bit more appreciative of the impressive biceps and abs on display.

She only has eyes for one man tonight, and his name is Adam Hunt. Every few minutes she checks her phone, waiting for the money to transfer. It never does.

Olivia sighs. So, he wants to do this the hard way. Fine.

It's a good thing she brought her bow.

 

* * *

 

 

In Adam Hunt's office, with his bodyguards spread out all over the floor, Olivia's fingers are secure on her bowstring. Her breathing is even and her hands are steady as she nocks her trick arrow. The weasel is up against his desk, sweating and shaking. Begging. Adam Hunt is a sniviling coward. Adam Hunt does not want to die.

Olivia remembers how she desperately pleaded for death only to escape the waves that brutally crashed against her tiny liferaft. She thinks about how the sun rose against the shape of an island called purgatory. The ocean spat her out on a beach coated with rock and sand. 

This moment is the reason fate allowed her to live. It has to be.

"Adam Hunt," she says. "You have failed this city."

Olivia lets the green arrow fly.


	2. Remarkable

Finley Smoak is born to Jacob and Esther Smoak on September 23rd, 1988 in Vegas, Nevada. He's a happy child, the second of two. His older sister, Emma Smoak, is headstrong and happy and just a twinge rebellious. Jacob Smoak leaves when Finley is six. Esther Smoak cries for weeks. Finley never forgives him for leaving, and he never forgives him for making his mother cry.

Perhaps that is the reason why Finley is more comfortable with his computers and gadgets than he is with his peers. Perhaps it is just an interest, a place where passion meets natural talent. All Finley knows at the time is that it makes him feel safe. Computers are always fixable; broken families are not.

Even as she grows older and prettier and more frequently noticed by boys, Emma still takes the time to hang out with him. She teaches him to count cards and plays Legend of Zelda with him and patiently listens to him go on about terabytes and RAM. (She doesn't completely understand the ins and outs of the technology, but she makes the attempt, and that's something he can appreciate.)

Finley builds his first computer when he is seven and starts to take college classes at fifteen. He makes a pretty nice income selling computers he's custom built and providing tech support for a few of the local mom-and-pop businesses. He designs and maintains websites for some of the local restaurants for a monthly fee.

When he's sixteen, Emma helps him bleach his hair.  She teases him the entire time, laughing about how he has too much brain to pull off being a blonde. Finn likes it though.

Somewhere in between papers and projects, Finn starts doing a bit of recreational hacking - a favor for an online buddy here, a small trifle for a friend there. He likes figuring out how he can work around the system. He's always felt himself to be a tiny bit of a rebel, with his love of bow ties and frequently bleached hair. He makes connections in the hacker community, nicknames and pseudonyms, but no real names or faces. Even when he goes legit - and he never _really_ goes legit; he always keeps up on his skills, thinking they might come in handy - he stays in touch.

Emma dies in a car accident when Finley is eighteen. Devastating isn't a sufficient word to cover the impact of the death. The loss rips his heart into two. He aches for one last conversation with her, one last episode of Doctor Who, but it isn't to be.

It's around this time that he starts looking for his father. He's not sure why, he's not sure he even really _wants_ to find him. He just wants to know that he _can_.

He flounders through his last year of High School, but still manages to get himself into MIT.

By the time he's twenty-two, Finn has his bachelor's degree in computer science. The document is only in his hands for a few weeks before he's offered a paid internship at Queen Consolidated.

The opportunity to escape a place that does nothing but remind him of Emma is enticing. So Finn packs up his desktop computer, his MIT sweatshirt, and his life-size cardboard cutout of Princess Leia and makes the transition from the suburbs to the city.

His boss at QC is barely competent, and Finley barely has the internship for a few months before he's offered a full-time job.

Robert Queen and his daughter go missing and are presumed dead barely twelve months after Finn takes the job.

The next eight months or so are tough for the company. Stock falls, the board freaks out. Jobs are cut, resignation letters are written. Finn steadfastly ignores a slew of job offers from other companies. They know there's blood in the water, but he feels oddly loyal.

At the end of the year, like a sun breaking through the clouds, in steps Moira Queen, fierce and uncompromising. In Finley's mind, she saves Queen Consolidated by sheer willpower alone. People who credit Moira's rise to Walter Steele are ignorant and uniformed, Finn thinks. Sure, the man helps, but it's Moira who does most of the legwork that patches up the sinking ship.

Things steadily get better as the years pass. Moira Queen and Walter Steele's wedding is small, but a company-wide party designed to pull together the 'QC family' is thrown once they return from their honeymoon.

The atmosphere of being part of something bigger, part of a company that _cares_ is one of the reasons Finn loves his job. He likes the people he works with, he likes the work that he's doing, and he _loves_ Starling City. As a result, he rises through the ranks at QC quickly.

 

* * *

 

Finley is neck deep in some seriously screwed up computer code when one of his coworkers, Lisa, bounces into his office. "Have you heard yet?"

Finn doesn't take his eyes from the abomination of symbols on his screen. Whoever coded this lacked all sense of finesse. He hates constantly having to fix his inept coworkers' screw-ups. "Have I heard what yet?"

"Olivia Queen. They found her."

"They found her body?"

Lisa shakes her heard, loose curls bouncing around her shoulders. "No, they found _her_. She's alive."

Finn opens up goggle on his second monitor and types in 'Olivia Queen found'.

A video pops up immediately. A newscaster's voice is heard over footage from five years ago of Olivia dancing topless on a fountain, her chest obscured by a black rectangle.

Scooting around his desk, Lisa leans over his shoulder. "Can you believe it? This has to be why Tasha said Mark told her that Jerry saw Mr. Steele rush out of his office early this morning and now he's missed three meetings today."

Tracing that rabbit trail of information is too much for Finn, so instead he shifts his attention back to the screen, where the reporter is saying something about the place Olivia was found, a few witty remarks about her pervious appearances in the tabloids, the Queen family has yet to release a statement...blah, blah, blah.

It's...intriguing, at the very least.

Lisa gets called away a second later, but even after she leaves, Finn keeps reading about Olivia Queen. He remembers the turmoil in the company after she disappeared, but that was less to do with her and more to do with her father. He'd never given much thought to Olivia Queen.

Words and phrases jump out at him, _twenty percent of her body is covered in scar tissue_ , _likely diagnosis of PTSD, the island she was stranded on was called_ Lian Yu, _no news has been released on the fates of Sean Lance and Robert Queen, who were also presumed dead..._

It's a good thing the entire company is in a bit of turmoil due to this bit of news, because Finn doesn't get much work done that afternoon.

 

* * *

 

"Finley Smoak?"

Spinning around in his chair Finn slowly pulls the pen he was nibbling on from between his lips and stares in surprise at the most beautiful woman he's ever seen. Then that beautiful woman smiles at him, and it's a good thing _she_ knows his name, because he instantly forgets every letter of _Finley Morgan Smoak_.

"Hi," she says, "I'm Olivia Queen."

Oh, _hell_. Do not think of her dancing naked on top of a fountain. Do _not_ think about her dancing naked on top of a fountain. Do not-- "Of course. I know who you are, Mrs. Queen. I've seen your photo. On the news. Congratulations on the whole not...drowning...thing." He clears his throat. "I'm sorry. You didn't come all the way down to the IT department to listen to me babble - which will end, in three, two, one..."

She takes mercy on him. "Call me Olivia."

"Olivia." He swallows. "Right. What can I do for you, Olivia?"

"I'm having some trouble with my computer and they told me that you were the person to come and see." Olivia holds up a laptop for a second, and then sets it gingerly on his desk. A little uneasily, she takes a step back. "I was at my coffee shop surfing the internet and I spilled a latte on it."

"Really?" Finley raises his eyebrows and touches the very obvious bullet holes with his index finger.

"Yeah."

"'Cause these look like bullet holes." He pulls his lip between his teeth and waits for her to offer up an explanation for her obviously not killed-by-coffee computer.

Olivia doesn't miss a beat. "My coffee shop is in a bad neighborhood."

It's the most absurd lie she could have possibly told, and the look on her face only confirms it. Finn doesn't have a knack for reading people's faces in poker - he's generally too busy counting cards - but even he can see that she's lying. Through her very nice teeth.

Olivia smiles again. "If there is anything that you can salvage from it, I would really appreciate it."

Reaching over, Finn grabs a chair, "Sit down."

 

* * *

 

Finn doesn't know what to think of Olivia Queen.

Truthfully, he finds her to be this weird mix of endearing and confusing. She's obviously smarter than she wants to let on, and she's obviously mixed up in _something_ weird if she's bringing him bullet-ridden laptops.

It's probably very foolish of him, but Finn's never liked leaving puzzles unsolved, so he does a bit of digging,

The name "Floyd Lawton" - the person Olivia seemed to _think_ the laptop-that-wasn't-really-hers belonged to - doesn't give him any hits.

He does a few searches on Unidac Industries, and the most recent news articles are all about the fact that the Starling City Vigilante - otherwise known as "The Hood Guy" made an appearance at their charity auction, not even a week after Olivia brought him the laptop.

Finley wonders if that's who she got it from. Could Olivia Queen really be mixed up in something like that? The girl the tabloids remember certainly wouldn't have been, but now...

Now Finley isn't quite so sure. She seems different from the woman in the video. Deeper, somehow, like she was hiding secrets behind her smile.

Finn wonders what Emma would think of Olivia, what her opinion of the woman would be?

He thinks Emma would spin a crazy theory about the laptop that would actually somehow make just enough sense for it to be plausible. Emma was fun like that. She would have laughed so hard at the idea of Olivia bringing him a laptop full of bullet holes and telling him she _spilled coffee on it_.

So the second time Olivia shows up at Queen Consolidated wanting assistance, Finley is aching to know what she wants him to do _next_.

"I was hoping you could look up an old friend for me," is not quite the exciting and puzzling quest he'd anticipated. So it's with more than a little annoyance that he quips, "I should add 'Personal Internet researcher for Olivia Queen to my job title."

Olivia raises her eyebrows incredulously, and Finley quickly amends, "Happily, I mean."

That seems to settle her down. She leans back in her chair. "His name is Derek Reston, we were close before I...went away, and I want to get back in touch."

He can't help but notice the way she twists a lock of her hair around her finger as she speaks. Thanks to all the photos the media used of her after her disappearance, Finn know that her soft brown hair used to drape halfway down her back; now it barely reaches her shoulders.

"Guess you didn't have facebook on that island."

Olivia's bodyguard, a tall, broad shouldered man Olivia hadn't bothered to introduce, quips, "Nope, not even a myspace account. It was a very dark time."

Right. Mentioning the whole stranded-on-an-island-for-five-years thing might be a little insensitive. Uncomfortable with that thought, Finley quickly turns his attention back to his tablet. "Well there's not much here that's recent. No credit activity, no utility bills." A Queen Industries ID card pops up during the search and a puzzle piece clicks into place. "Ah. I guess you guys must have met at the factory."

Leaning forward, Olivia carefully says, "What factory?"

_Damn._ So there's one more mystery of Olivia Queen. "The Queen Steel Factory," he answers. "Derek Reston worked there for fifteen years before it shut down in '07."

"Derek Reston worked for my father?"

"You weren't really close friends, huh?" He tries not to sound smug, but this woman just keeps _lying_ to him, and he keeps going along with it because...he's not even sure why. There's only so much bullshit he'll take, even from a woman who looks like Olivia Queen.

So he tells her what she wants to know. "Looks like Derek was the factory foreman until your dad outsourced production to China. About fifteen hundred employees got laid off. looks like the finance guys even found a loophole in the union contract so they didn't have to pay severance packages and pensions to their employees. They all pretty much lost their homes...including your _friend_."

 

* * *

 

After Olivia leaves, Finn writes down the name Derek Reston on a post-it note and makes plans to find out more about him later. Thanks to a suddenly intense coding project, _later_ ends up being almost a week. He hacks the SCPD and finds out that Derek Reston had been identified as part of a group of bank robbers preying on at least two of Starling's banks.

And he'd been killed during an ensuing fight - possibly with the vigilante.

When Finn reads that, he leans back in his desk chair, mind racing.

Olivia Queen had a computer belonging to Unidac Industries. A few days later, the Hood crashed their charity auction.

Olivia Queen knew - or claimed to know - Derek Reston, and wanted to find him right before he was killed.

And then the Hood was at the scene of that crime as well.

None of it sits well in Finley's stomach.

And then, in what at first appears to be a completely unrelated event, Walter Steele calls Finn up to his office one night while both of them are working late.

Walter slides a small, leather-bound book across his desk and says, "I want you to find out all you can about that notebook: where it was made, how it was purchased, and what it could mean."

Finn takes the book and turns it over in his hands, the leather is soft and the pages are unwrinkled. "Yes, sir."

"Finley." Walter's tone is serious, "I asked Josiah Hudson, my head of security, to look into the same subject matter. He died the next day, under questionable circumstances. What I may be asking of you - this mystery - are you sure you want to do this?"

He thinks of Olivia and her eyes and her smile and the way she flirts to distract him from the fact that she's lying through her teeth. How she nonchalantly brought him a laptop that had obviously been in the middle of a shoot-out and then offered no _real_ explanation. He thinks about Unidac Industries, Floyd Lawton, the vigilante and Derek Reston, and how nothing about Olivia Queen makes any kind of sense.

He thinks about how soft and smooth her hair looks, how she dresses to hide an impressive amount of muscle, how there's always something sad and broken behind her eyes.

"I hate mysteries," Finn says, "They bug me. They need to be solved."

 

* * *

 

Finding the list of names written in invisible ink just makes Finley's life _so_ much more complicated. Seven of the names on the list are men the vigilante has gone after, which means there's yet _another tie_ between the Queen family and the Hood.

He keeps the book itself at his apartment and transfers the list of names onto his tablet. He's been able to find dirt on just about every person he's checked out, but the list is long. He doesn't want to use his personal computer for something like this, so he starts staying a few extra hours late at work to check out the names.

One of these nights, Finley scouring the list of names for other, non-criminal connections, when he hears a soft, "Hey."

He swears he jumps three feet into the air. Standing in front of him is Olivia Queen, smiling sweetly at him, which is just all kinds of  _not fair_.

A hand goes to straighten his bow-tie as Finley asks, "Don't you knock?"

She chuckles. "Finley, this is the IT department. It's not the men's room."

Nervously, he swallows. "Right." He carefully closes the incriminating window on his tablet. "What can I do for you?"

"My boyfriend, Steve, is really into archery. Apparently it's all the rage now."

Boyfriend.

Right.

Someone like her would have one of those. And he'd be pretentious enough to like _archery_ of all things. "I don't know why. Looks utterly ridiculous to me."

He doesn't mention that the rage is probably due to this hooded vigilante person putting arrows in the chests of Starling City's elite.

"Mmhmm." Olivia is displaying that quiet impatience he knows her so well for. She's not here to listen to his opinions of archery; she's here to get what she wants.

"Anyway," Olivia says, "it's Steve's birthday next weekend, and I wanted to by him some arrows. Thing is, he gets these special custom-made arrows, and I have no idea where he gets them."

She holds out a black arrow. "I was hoping you could find out where this came from."

Finn reaches for it, but Olivia pulls it back just a touch. "Careful."

"Yeah," he says softly, and this time she lets him take it.

After a quick examination of the arrow, Finley starts typing and talking. Olivia listens intently. "Shaft's composite is patented...and that patent is registered to a company called Sagittarius. It's Latin, for _the archer_."

He passes back the arrow. Olivia slides it back into its cardboard tube. "Could you find out where and when this was purchased?"

Finley doesn't point out that she's asking for information that wouldn't remotely be helpful to order more for her "boyfriend" Steve. She's not looking to buy more; she's looking to find whoever bought this one. "According to Sagittarius company records that arrow was part of a bundle shipment... 200 units...sent to this address."

He scribbles down the address on a post-it note, mind racing. Was he just handed the last clue in the Mystery of Olivia Queen? Scars. Bullets. Laptops. The Hood.

An _arrow_.

But not a green arrow, not like the kind the Starling City Police Department says the vigilante uses. He's going to have to do some more digging into that later.

For now, he passes her the address she wants.

"Finn," Olivia says, taking the square of paper. "You're remarkable."

There's a note of sincerity in her voice that makes his heart beat just a touch faster. Finn can't help himself; he smiles at her.

"Thank you for remarking on it."

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This author's note is completely skippable, but in case there are questions about a few decisions made, let me explain some of the logic in decisions that were made regarding Finley/guy!Felicity in this chapter.
> 
> Most of the background for Finley was written before any mention of Felicity's father abandoning them or her mother being a cocktail waitress in Vegas. That included Emma. I altered the other information to keep this as canon compliant as possible, but given the fact that the writers really haven't given us much about Felicity's past, I decided that I wanted to keep the sister in.
> 
> If you have any questions about how or why certain decisions were made, feel free to ask in the comments, or to drop an ask in my tumblr askbox at andyouweremine.tumblr.com. I'm happy to chat with you.
> 
> Finally, I cannot begin to tell you how hard it was to keep this interesting and (mostly) canon-compliant. Please let me know if I succeeded. 
> 
> To everyone who patiently waited for more of this fic, thank you. I'll try to get the next part (which will jump back to Olivia's POV) posted as soon as I can.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [cards on the table (we're both showing hearts)](https://archiveofourown.org/works/4752662) by [always_a_queen](https://archiveofourown.org/users/always_a_queen/pseuds/always_a_queen)




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